Oakland: Furniture designer works outside the box for art you can sit on

Paul Kilduff, Special to The Chronicle

Published 4:00 am, Friday, July 16, 2004

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

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070804_eblbennett_kocihernandez CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Feature story on high-end furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett. His work has appeared at the Oakland Musueum. Currently, he is working on a table at his Oakland shop. less

070804_eblbennett_kocihernandez CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ/CHRONICLE Feature story on high-end furniture maker Garry Knox Bennett. His work has appeared at the Oakland Musueum. Currently, he is working on a table ... more

Photo: CHRISTINA KOCI HERNANDEZ

Oakland: Furniture designer works outside the box for art you can sit on

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From his two-story brick warehouse just a few blocks southeast of Jack London Square, Garry Knox Bennett, a furniture maker with an artist's sensibility, has been churning out highly imaginative tables, chests, chairs and other one-of-a-kind pieces for more than 30 years.

You won't find this kind of stuff at Ikea. Starting at about $5,000 for a chair and $30,000 for a desk or table, Bennett relies on high-end galleries devoted to the concept of furniture as art in New York, San Francisco and Carmel to sell his work. He also shows his pieces in museums internationally.

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Amid the organized chaos that is his downstairs workshop, the 6-foot-9, bearded 70-year-old is busily transforming a common plastic patio chair into what looks like a recliner by bending back its back and arm rests in vises. As to its meaning of possibly elevating the status of the lowly resin chair, Bennett will say coyly only that he's "elevating the price."

Bennett is in the midst of a chair phase started this year. Upstairs in the living quarters he shares with his wife, Sylvia, are more seats to ponder, including his latest zigzag series. A takeoff on the famous z-shaped chair made by Dutch designer Gerrit Rietveld in 1934, Bennett's versions incorporate his trademark humor -- just don't call him whimsical, a term he detests. There's the "Great Granny Rietveld" with a rose print cushion; a "Ladder Back" zigzag featuring a little ladder going up the backrest; and a "Wing Chair" with wings attached to the sides. All, except for one with a vertical board through the middle of the seat, are functional chairs, although the 280- pound Bennett is considering putting a weight rating on their undersides.

Functionality is important to Bennett. "I know my work is out of the ordinary but I do like the aspect of functionality, and I try to incorporate it most of the time. I don't make a big table that only one person can sit at, so to speak," says Bennett.

One of the main tricks up Bennett's sleeve is playing with the notion of being called an artist. In a series of tongue-in-check artist's statements that appear in the Bennetts' self-published book "Made in Oakland, the Furniture of Garry Knox Bennett," he says: "I am not an artist. Artists are under six feet tall, they hate Chevrolets, and if they do not live in New York, they want to."

Bennett's ride of choice is a full-size jet black Caprice Classic station wagon. (He's also a rabid Raiders fan.) At the College of Arts and Crafts, Bennett concentrated on sculpture and spearheaded the first spontaneous driftwood sculptures on the Emeryville mud flats. By 1962, he was selling his work, but times were tough and the Bennetts decided to move to Sylvia's former stepfather's rice farm in Lincoln (Placer County), near Sacramento.

There he got his first taste of wood working, building an A-frame on the farm to live in. He also managed to sculpt and befriended local artists Wayne Thiebaud and Mel Ramos, but by 1965 he tired of the agrarian life and returned to Alameda.

In the late '60s, Bennett began making jewelery. Latching on to the burgeoning drug and anti-war culture, Bennett began making roach clips and peace sign lapel pins. Business boomed, and with his newfound fortune Bennett bought a Victorian on Alameda's historic Gold Coast, and began making furniture.

Bennett the furniture-maker drew attention when he became one of the first to stray from wood and began using aluminum, steel, plywood, Formica and plastic in his pieces. In 1979 he turned the furniture-making establishment on its ear when he constructed a technically perfect wooden cabinet in a traditional style for a gallery in San Francisco and then drove a nail into the upper door, gouging the area around the nail with hammer marks. Bennett's "Nail Cabinet" created such a stir that someone actually pulled the nail out of the piece. It was later replaced. A running commentary on the nail's appropriateness was written by supporters and detractors inside the drawers.

"That's the most sensational aspect of his kind of iconoclasm," says Suzanne Baizerman, curator of decorative arts at the Oakland Museum. "I don't think it's so much that he doesn't admire the work in those old antique pieces, but it's more that he doesn't like people being so sanctimonious about it and that this is the only way." Baizerman brought a retrospective of Bennett's work to the museum in 2001.

"His work has always been outside the box. He tries new materials. He's not fettered by centuries of tradition," Baizerman says.

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Avid art collectors, Garry and Sylvia Bennett will share many of their finds in the show "The Sylvia and Garry Knox Bennett Collection," beginning with a gala opening on Oct. 21 at the San Francisco Museum of Craft+Design, 550 Sutter St., San Francisco, (415) 773-0303, info@sfmcd.org.

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